"Ach," said the doctor, who seldom said ach. "It should not happen to a dog. Not yet even to a hyena!"
"—dowser in Oklahoma who charged fees to locate water," Fortenay ran on relentlessly. "He got away with that racket until I went out with some geological experts and a cameraman and showed him up. After that—"
After that, thought Dr. Weigand, the poor fellow's gift was destroyed along with his confidence, and there was nothing.
But the doctor's commiseration rang hollow even to himself, for it had occurred to him suddenly that it might not be necessary, after all, for this thing to happen to him and to Anna and Karen and Wilhelmina.
It would mean the end of Hans Weigand, of course, but his project would go on. He would be not a heel but a hero, and his family would be pensioned instead of pilloried. And what is death to a true scientist, when the man must die anyway but his reputation may live forever?
"—trouble is that people are so gullible," Fortenay was expounding. (He pronounced it gullable, not that it mattered.) "They'll believe anything they're told as long as it has its roots in some old myth or legend handed down to them. They'll believe it if their fathers believed it, because they're fools."
He leaned across the cramped cell of the bathysphere and tapped the doctor on the knee.
"And do you know why people are fools, Wiggy? Because scientists teach them to be fools. Every superstition that people cling to was handed down from the time when wise men—the scientists of the day—taught it as gospel truth. Scientists are always making some kind of mistake, and the people foot the bill.
"A few years ago they made an error in some law about variable stars, a little bobble of a hundred per cent, and now they're saying the whole universe is twice as big as they'd been teaching.